Re: Cleaning up garbage in packed numeric fields??

Douglas Handy wrote:
> 
> While FixNbr() can "fix" bad numeric data, I think the real question
> is why the data is bad in the first place.  How can you be sure that
> the "fix" by substituting invalid zone and digit nibbles really gives
> you the value you should have?
> 
> You may be just treating a symptom and hiding a larger problem.  I
> think you need to examine what creates the data (if this is under your
> control).
> 

I agree.  "Fixing" a record so the data may or may not be meaningless
seems odd to me.  And there may be equally wrong data in character
fields, but because the system doesn't care what data is in character
fields, you won't get an exception.  Maybe the data isn't always being
put in the positions that the RPG program expects.

If you wanted to just completely skip bad records, you could read the
file program-described into a data structure, and then process the data
structure subfields in a monitor group, then if anything failed, you
could handle it in the on-error - either massage the data (if that makes
sense), or write the bad record out to some other file for manual
inspection.